Almost nine of ten online customers expect good usability and transparent ordering conditions. 63 percent of the customers quit purchasing if the products’ description is insufficient. And: Personal advice isn’t expected from online shop service. This is the result of a survey of the Connox home design shop, one of the market leading online shops for design furniture and home accessories, amongst its more than 250,000 customers.

Good usability of the online shop and transparent information about prices, shipping costs and delivery is what online customers expect, but most of all, they expect free returning possibilities (75 percent) and all-including product descriptions (73 percent). Data protection is important to 55 percent of online purchasers – most of them are women and older people. More than a half of the people we asked expects free shipping. Surprising: The possibility of returning the goods for free is important to eight of ten women, while one half of the men would pay for returning parcels.

People that are used to purchasing like it fast and comfortable
The amount of people that purchase online more than once a week, likes to get the goods as fast as possible: More than a half of them expects their parcels to arrive within two days. Six of ten moreover expects to get the products shipped for free, and two thirds quit purchasing if there are return costs to be paid by them. This is more than average. People that are used to purchasing on the internet want to be able to track what they bought (64 percent) and they often get back to personal advice by customer services.

One third of the surveyed have never asked for personal advise while shopping on the internet, 52 percent hardly ever did. This is also viewed in the expectations: Only 18 percent expect personal advice – most of them are older customers. If customers search for customer service employees, they use to write an E-Mail (65 percent) or they look for a telephone (52 percent). Women prefer invoices to pay, men prefer PayPal.

Service in the online shop wins

“Not only the price, but the service is what makes a distributor special and different to the competitors. The expectations of the customer regarding service in online shops isn’t lower, but different”, explained Thilo Haas, managing director of Connox. “All-including product descriptions and many images or videos are important for example, because the customer isn’t able to hold the product in his hands.” Thereby the service of online shops isn’t a bad one: The surveyed gave four of five stars to it as average mark, which is a slightly better result than the evaluation of the service of stationary shops.

Hidden order conditions are a reason to stop
The reasons to stop buying or avoiding an online shop in the future, are manifold. More than a half of online customers quit shopping if the products aren’t sufficiently described, or if the order conditions aren’t visible or if the customer has to pay for returning parcels. Risk factors are unorganized shop pages and a complicated search-function: If a product can’t be found immediately, each second customer leaves the online shop. If the privacy policy isn’t easily understandable, if there are false payment options or bad calculated retour rules, customers might quit purchasing as well.

1,645 online customers were surveyed.

About the Connox home design shop (www.connox.com)
The Connox home design shop belongs to the market leading online shops offering home design. The home design shop offers more than 11,000 carefully selected products of a premium class including design objects, design classics and other beautiful things for homes and public places. The company is based in Hannover and it runs the shop with the home-own “EC-Suite”, which has especially been developed for Connox by the subsidiary Quillo GmbH.